Vascular aging and genetic risk jointly shape coronary artery disease susceptibility across races and sexes.
BackgroundEstimated pulse wave velocity (ePWV), a noninvasive marker of arterial stiffness, reflects vascular aging and has been associated with increased coronary artery disease (CAD) risk. However, the interplay between ePWV and genetic factors, including polygenic risk score (PRS) and apolipoprotein E genotypes, in determining CAD susceptibility remains unclear.
This review examines some of the monogenic disorders that can masquerade as neuroinflammatory phenotypes.
A recent explosion in genomic testing has led to the identification of several genetic disorders that mimic CNS-specific autoimmune disorders. Such monogenic disorders, although rare, represent a diagnostic challenge because of their diverse phenotypes and overlapping features. Early recognition of these disorders is crucial not only to prevent overtreatment with immunotherapy but also to ensure that targeted treatments are available for many of these disorders. This review explores some of the monogenic disorders that can masquerade as neuroinflammatory phenotypes. These clinical vignettes are stratified according to neuroanatomical localization along the neuroaxis: supratentorial white matter, gray matter, brainstem, and spinal cord involvement.
Great paper highlighting key challenges for genetically engineered bacterial therapies in the human gut. It is respectable that this paper was published in Science despite some “negative” results. Although the genetically engineered bacteria were all supposed to die after removal of porphyrin from the diet, they sometimes rebounded. Even with an improved porphyrin pathway which was supposed to resist mutational rebound, the bacteria still persisted in a mouse model, apparently by mysterious non-mutational means. Maybe the microbiomes of the mice somehow supplied porphyrin to the bacteria without the knowledge of the researchers. Furthermore, therapeutic application of the genetically engineered bacteria in humans only resulted in modest (and not statistically significant) decreases in urine oxalate. This was partly due to horizontal gene transfer which replaced the engineered oxalate degradation pathway and partly due to the general fitness burden of the engineered oxalate degradation pathway. As such, this paper revealed a lot of important obstacles which will need to be worked on for bacterial therapies to move forward in the future.
(https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu8000)
Precision microbiome programming for therapeutic applications is limited by challenges in achieving reproducible colonic colonization. Previously, we created an exclusive niche that we used to engraft engineered bacteria into diverse microbiota in mice by using a porphyran prebiotic. Building on this approach, we have now engineered conditional attenuation into a porphyran-utilizing strain of Phocaeicola vulgatus by replacing native essential gene regulation with a porphyran-inducible promoter to allow reversible engraftment. Engineering a five-gene oxalate degradation pathway into the reversibly engrafting strain resulted in a therapeutic candidate that reduced hyperoxaluria, a cause of kidney stones, in preclinical models.
It may cause us to geneticly engineer ourselves to live in dangerous environments too.
Throughout human history, we have associated our spirituality, myths, and religions with the sky. Constellations are peppered with sky stories, from Orion to Warepil (the eagle constellation of aboriginal Australians). The Lakota Native Americans associated the Milky Way as a path for departed souls. Jesus ascended to the heavens. The primary god of ancient Egyptians was Ra, the god of the Sun. And the entire Universe was seen inside Krishna’s mouth.
Jason Batt, a science fiction author, mythologist, and futurist, has spent a lot of time thinking about stories like this, and how our relationship with the heavens will change when we become a space-faring race. “So what happens to humanity?” Batt, who is also a co-founder of Deep Space Predictive Research Group and a Creative Manager of 100 Year Starship, pondered while speaking to Big Think. “What is going to change in us? What is going to transform?”
Even though we often associate our space travel with feats of engineering and science, there is an undeniable connection with our myth as well. We see this in how we name our rockets destined for space: Gemini, Apollo, Artemis. Going to space is big, not just for our technology, but for our spirits.
In this video, we break down six major scientific breakthroughs from July to September that are pushing us closer to true age reversal — from AI-designed drugs and senolytics to epigenetic reset and real human results.
You’ll see how AI, wet-lab automation, and new biomarkers are accelerating longevity research faster than ever before — and what this means for your future healthspan.
0:51 — Breakthrough #1: AI Becomes the Scientist.
1:30 — Breakthrough #2: Reprogramming at 50× Speed.
2:24 — Breakthrough #3: Human Results Are Finally Here.
2:52 — Breakthrough #4: AI Discovers Drugs From Scratch.
3:38 — Breakthrough #5: Aging Now Has a Dashboard.
4:12 — Breakthrough #6: The Telomere Puzzle (TEN1)
4:38 — The Double-Edged Sword of Rejuvenation.
5:04 — The LEV Cycle.
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The human brain is a fascinating and complex organ that supports numerous sophisticated behaviors and abilities that are observed in no other animal species. For centuries, scientists have been trying to understand what is so unique about the human brain and how it develops over the human lifespan.
Recent technological and experimental advances have opened new avenues for neuroscience research, which in turn has led to the creation of increasingly detailed descriptions of the brain and its underlying processes. Collectively, these efforts are helping to shed new light on the underpinnings of various neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders.
Researchers at Beijing Normal University, the Changping Laboratory and other institutes have recently set out to study both the human and macaque brain, comparing their development over time using various genetic and molecular analysis tools. Their paper, published in Nature Neuroscience, highlights some key differences between the two species, with the human pre-frontal cortex (PFC) developing slower than the macaque PFC.
“Unraveling the cellular and molecular characteristics of human prefrontal cortex (PFC) development is crucial for understanding human cognitive abilities and vulnerability to neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders,” wrote Jiyao Zhang, Mayuqing Li, and their colleagues in their paper. “We created a comparative repository for gene expression, chromatin accessibility and spatial transcriptomics of human and macaque postnatal PFC development at single-cell resolution.”
Human-specific molecular and cellular regulatory programs prolong prefrontal cortical maturation by orchestrating postnatal development of neurons and glia, with implications for cognitive function and susceptibility to neurodevelopmental disorders.
The human brain is a fascinating and complex organ that supports numerous sophisticated behaviors and abilities that are observed in no other animal species. For centuries, scientists have been trying to understand what is so unique about the human brain and how it develops over the human lifespan.
Recent technological and experimental advances have opened new avenues for neuroscience research, which in turn has led to the creation of increasingly detailed descriptions of the brain and its underlying processes. Collectively, these efforts are helping to shed new light on the underpinnings of various neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders.
Researchers at Beijing Normal University, the Changping Laboratory and other institutes have recently set out to study both the human and macaque brain, comparing their development over time using various genetic and molecular analysis tools. Their paper, published in Nature Neuroscience, highlights some key differences between the two species, with the human pre-frontal cortex (PFC) developing slower than the macaque PFC.
In a major step toward understanding how the physical form of DNA shapes human biology, researchers at Northwestern University working with the 4D Nucleome Project have created the most comprehensive maps yet of the genome’s three-dimensional organization over time and space. The work is described in a new study published in Nature.
The research, based on experiments in human embryonic stem cells and fibroblasts, provides an expansive picture of how genes interact with one another, fold into complex structures, and shift their positions as cells carry out normal functions and divide. The study was co-led by Feng Yue, the Duane and Susan Burnham Professor of Molecular Medicine in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics.
“Understanding how the genome folds and reorganizes in three dimensions is essential to understanding how cells function,” said Yue, who is also director of the Center for Advanced Molecular Analysis and founding director of the Center for Cancer Genomics at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University. “These maps give us an unprecedented view of how genome structure helps regulate gene activity in space and time.”
Of course, many people are familiar with the impressive mental abilities of the corvid family (crows, ravens, magpies, and jays), but even everyday avians like pigeons and chickens, would score surprisingly high on Newen and Montemayor’s consciousness scale. In one experiment known as the “mirror-audience test,” roosters were placed in an enclosure with a barrier separating them. When the shadow of a bird of prey was projected overhead, the test rooster warned its fellow conspecific (member of the same species), and when it was alone, it did not. Interestingly, when a mirror was placed in the enclosure to replace the previously see-through barrier, the test rooster did not warn its conspecific partner, even though the animal remained on the other side of the mirror, suggesting that the rooster was able to differentiate itself from other members of its own species.
“The presented results add to the growing body of evidence that consciousness may be present in many parts of the animal kingdom, across species that are phylogenetically distant from each other and have remarkably different brain structures,” the authors wrote. “Consciousness should not be deemed as an ‘all-or-nothing’ cognitive function but rather as a graded and multi-dimensional process.”
